Ron Perlman Wants to Make ‘Hellboy 3’ and He Needs Your Help

Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy was a modest financial success, but it did well enough on home video to warrant a sequel (albeit at a different studio). Unfortunately, the superior Hellboy II: The Golden Army opened the week before The Dark Knight swept the summer of 2008 off its feet and totally dominated the superhero movie conversation. The second movie adventure of Mike Mignola’s wisecracking demon-turned-superhero did okay, but a third movie never materialized a part three looks unlikely to this day. Just don’t tell that to Ron Perlman, who is dead-set on making this series a trilogy and took to social media to enlist fan support.

Perlman made his feelings known in a tweet, where he called upon fans to help make #HellboyIII a trending tweet:

Perlman’s online pleas were met by fans, by they were also met by series co-star Doug Jones, who played the psychic fish-man Abe Sapien:

The sad truth about the Hellboy movies is that they probably would have been bigger hits if they were released today. In the mid-2000s, an oddball comic book movie about a big red demon and his mutant friends traveling the world and battling supernatural evil for the United States government was a hard sell for non-geeks. In 2015, movies like Guardians of the Galaxy have shown us that weird has officially gone mainstream. If anything, the cinematic version of Hellboy arrived a decade too soon.

But let’s say a studio sees that fans are interested in a Hellboy 3. Let’s say those early conversations start to happen. Could the series get Guillermo del Toro, who is booked from here to eternity, to return? And if not, would we even want to see another movie in this series without him? There’s also Perlman, who is 65 years old (he only looks like he reached the age of 50 in his 20s and then stopped aging altogether). Even under all of that Hellboy make-up, Perlman is getting awfully old to play a youthful superhero.

So consider us tentatively supportive of a Hellboy 3. It just needs to happen now. And it needs to find a way to pull del Toro away from Pacific Rim 2 and The Haunted Mansion. And it needs to have a proper budget, even though the series has never lit the box office on fire. The last film ended with a huge cliffhanger – surely the movie gods can smile on this one and give us some closure!